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Anti-violence activist killed in Mexico

Wed, Nov 30, 2011, 00:00

An activist who publicly accused police officers of kidnapping his teenage son has been shot dead in an attack that has fueled Mexico's bitter nationwide debate over crime and corruption.

Corrupt officials were being blamed by citizen activists who worked with Nepomuceno Moreno in a national anti-crime movement that has been calling for an end to organized crime, police abuse and a military-led government assault on drug cartels.

The prosecutor's office in the northern border state of Sonora claimed, however, that Mr Moreno had a criminal past and it was that, not activism, which appeared to have led to his death. Officials said Mr Moreno was shot at least five times when he stopped his van at an intersection on Monday afternoon in Hermosillo, the capital city of Sonora, which borders Arizona.

The exchange of blame for Mr Moreno's death echoed a wider national dispute.

Many Mexicans focus the blame for tens of thousands of crime-related deaths on the incompetence and corruption of federal, state and local authorities. President Felipe Calderon, in turn, has outraged crime victims and their families by saying that 90 per cent of those slain in a 5-year-old government war on drug cartels were themselves involved in crime.

Mr Moreno, a 56-year-old seafood vendor, became one of the most visible faces of Mexico's anti-crime movement after his 18-year-old son Jorge Mario disappeared in July last year.

Saying masked police had kidnapped his son and two other young men, Mr Moreno pleaded his case directly to Mr Calderon last month in a meeting between the conservative leader and members of poet Javier Sicilia's Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity.

Mr Moreno gave the president documents about his son's case, and told Mr Calderon that he feared for his own security and the safety of his family, a spokesman for the movement said. Mr Moreno said in a video interview posted by the movement online that he had been repeatedly threatened by the men who grabbed his son, whom he claimed were police working with organized crime.

"We hold state and federal authorities responsible for their inaction in this death, for not responding to the requests for protection put forth by our comrade," spokesman Pietro Ameglio said.

Mr Sicilia launched his movement after his son Juan Francisco was killed

in the central city of Cuernavaca along with six other people in what officials called a case of mistaken identity by drug-cartel members warring with other criminals. The movement has organized a series of increasingly high-profile marches and protests throughout the country.

Since the meeting with Mr Moreno and other victims' families, Mr Calderon has altered some of his rhetoric about the drug war, saying that victims of violence should be the focus of national attention regardless of whether they had been involved in crime.

Mr Sicilia said yesterday that Mr Moreno's relatives now fear for their lives, and he focused the blame for the killing on unidentified people in authority.

A spokesman for the Sonora state attorney general's office, Jose Larrinaga Talamantes, told reporters that the principal line of investigation in Moreno's death was drug trafficking, saying the victim had been involved with organised crime at least since his 1979 arrest in Arizona for heroin smuggling and possession.

In 1997, Mr Moreno was jailed again on drug-related charges, Mr Larrinaga said.

"There are various lines of investigation that remain open, but the principal one is his relationship with organised crime," he said. Mr Moreno's son's kidnapping was also being looked at, he added.

Violence attributed to organized crime has killed more than 35,000 people between December 2006, when Mr Calderon sent soldiers to his home state of Michoacan in western Mexico, and the end of 2010. Authorities have provided no figures for 2011, although some groups including Mr Sicilia's say the death toll has now climbed above 40,000.